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Since Agile is very people focussed, there is a further need to understand how team size
affects individual behaviour and productivity within an Agile team. This gives rise to another
challenge:
This paper analyses an Agile project management methodology, pilot it in practice with real life
projects and aims at identifying the people factors to be considered for an Agile team to be
effective. This study takes into consideration to some extent a few psychological factors that can
affect team collaboration such as working memory, optimal experience and recommended team
size based on social behaviours. To achieve this, three sample Agile teams of different size will
be used and managed with the same Agile principles. The results will help determine which
team, given that they all have all the necessary skills sets and similar team member profiles, will
work best and produce the most optimal results. Agile recommends that, instead of having only
developers, Agile teams should have all the required skills sets.
Although some Agile methodologies such as Scrum do have a recommended team size, it is a
widely believed that Agile is a concept of one size fits all and is therefore scalable. But the
question then arises, how big is too much for an Agile team before it starts to lose its
efficiency? In a research performed by Ancona and Caldwell’s (1992), the results indicated
that team size may have a direct impact on group performance and communication. Agile
Management is very people focus whereas Software Project Management is a rather technical
discipline. Project Managers moving from traditional to Agile Methods often spend more time
managing projects rather than managing the people working on the projects. This implies that
people factors are often not considered when managing Agile teams and they may not be
performing at their optimal level.
In spite of the growing popularity of Agile Management (Agile Manifesto, 2011) the rate at
which software projects are failing is still alarming. According to the Standish 2009 Chaos
Report (Standish, 2009), the average success rate is of all IT projects is 32%, 44% were
challenged and the failure rate is 24%. The project success rate has decreased from previous
years with only 32% being successful, whereby these were delivered on time, to budget and
with all required functionalities. 44% of the projects were challenged which means that either
they were delivered late, over budget, and/or with less functionalities that were initially
intended. The remaining 24% of IT projects failed and had to be cancelled prior to completion
and were never used.
Furthermore, according to Scott W. Ambler (2010a), the success rates for Agile projects are
60% are successful, 28% are challenged, and 12% are failures. The success rate for Agile
projects is 83% for small teams (less than eleven people), 70% for medium-sized teams
(between eleven and twenty-five people), and 55% for large teams (more than twenty-five
people). Based from these figures it is clear that Agile team size has a direct incidence on the
success rate of the project.
The motivation for this paper is to provide an overview of the people factors that are often
ignored when using agile for setting-up of software development teams. Further to this finding,
an insight is provided into the size of an optimal collocated agile team. In section 2, related agile
management ideas are discussed. The research method is discussed in section 3. Results and discussion from the study are included in sections 4. Section 5 presents a conclusion and an
outline for future work.